Climate Change Theater Action - Power and Possibility
My Fulbright experience with the Climate Change Theater Action festival (CCTA) in Austria with the Universities of Graz, Feldkirch, Inssbruck, and Vienna reinforced my belief that theater is an indispensable tool for addressing the climate crisis, as it is an essential activity addressing what it means to be human and the complexities of that existential inquiry. Working on the CCTA plays with graduate students and professors was an opportunity to rediscover the power and possibility of our own craft.
The CCTA inspired me to become a Fulbright Specialist, connecting my social justice work to a more global perspective while retaining the impact of a local lens. My partnership with Professor Nassim Balestrini in Graz illuminated the brilliance of the CCTA vision: working on the very large (climate change, international cooperation and understanding, the role of arts in social justice movements) through the very small (short plays, finite windows of time, small rooms and small groups). In concrete, bite-sized, easily measurable high-impact outcome morsels we were able to connect on deeply human levels and fundamentally shift our sense of power and possibility.
The plays commissioned for the festival directly and indirectly explore the tools we need to confront the greatest existential threat in our lifetime. Empathy. Creative, collaborative problem solving. Integration of diverse perspectives. The ability to shift individual thinking patterns and perspectives. Centering marginalized people’s stories. Decentering people and involving environments, plants, and animals as characters in the story of our ecosystem. Making a huge issue relatable. Communicating facts and information without meeting boredom, fear, or anger in resistance. Not only communicating but engaging people in both information and story. Active, practical, tangible hope.
Theater wields those tools on a regular basis. Theater is a physical and an emotional shift of perspective. Embodied experience. Relational experience. Listening. Discovery. Intentional storytelling. A space for multiple kinds of sensibilities (actors, director, designers, makers, thinkers, etc) to move a narrative forward. The practice of fun, which leads to the knowledge of joy. Theater is a biofeedback system designed to increase our capacity for empathy, understanding, resilience, and wonder.
The performance and everything leading up to it opened my eyes to new ways of formulating and communicating meaning…this has made me realize again why I do want to research these issues and do the work that I strive to do. - Graz Grad Student
Working on climate justice plays with people twice-removed in perspective - academics and educators vs. practitioners, Austrians vs. Americans - I saw theater itself with new eyes, and why it is a tool climate justice needs: a space for multiple kinds of sensibilities (actors, director, designers, makers, thinkers, etc) to move a narrative forward, and biofeedback system designed to increase our capacity for empathy, understanding, resilience, and wonder.
The performance and everything leading up to it opened my eyes to new ways of formulating and communicating meaning.
Teaching in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary capacity, outside of typical theater spaces, I was invited to articulate and invite others to appreciate the tremendous gifts of this craft. First and foremost of which - we get to have so much fun! Every moment of this project was rich in discovery, and working with such brilliant academic researchers was like directing a team of dramaturgs, each one with fascinating insight and eager to collaborate in a spirit of inquiry and critical thinking.
The different perspectives of my group members made me see things and feel emotions I have not seen and felt before when reading the plays by myself.
One of my favorite moments was in casting, when Nassim was very impressed by my ability to strategically set ourselves up for various scenarios of some students not being available for rehearsal/performance. Flexible casting and alternate rehearsal plans is the air theater practitioners breathe - I had never thought of it as a curriculum plan, or even really a skill. Working with Nassim, I learned not only so much about her areas of expertise, including her deep knowledge of theater history and aesthetics, but also my own. Ours was an international partnership that felt like a gift exchange.
I feel like I really understand theater for the very first time in my studies.
During our process, I could see sparks of understanding how arts integration can support all sectors and styles of learning. Educators, students, and activists of all ages got excited about integrating play and performance in their work in order to more fully explore, articulate, and embody scientific and academic concepts. Shy individuals gave stunningly full-throated performances, and highly theoretical thinkers found passion, humor, and humanity helped them understand their thoughts more clearly. Students left the experience more equipped for the performative aspects of teaching, and more confident in their own authentic voice.
Theatre-making was a brilliant choice to teach us about the concept of planetarity and relationality. Embracing the interconnectedness of the group on a microlevel made us understand how relationality could function on a bigger scale.
Our CCTA project was a bridge between academia and practice, between mind and body. On the one side we began by sifting through 50 plays and collectively choosing 3 representative pieces - an empowering exercise that builds interpersonal, intellectual, and emotional strength. There were tons of delicious surprises as students lobbied for unexpected plays, which created an opportunity for mutual understanding and a director’s sheer delight in realizing how much more there is to discover. One of my favorite aspects of our collaboration were these discussions around which plays and why - these young academics approached the plays with thoughtful, passionate, rigorous inquiry and made terrific dramaturgs. I’ve kept some of their written work as examples of how dramaturgy can be enriched by outside academic perspective, and also how as artists we may never know what sparks our work might ignite across great distances of time and space.
On the other side, we began by pushing desks aside and getting on our feet with basic collaborative storytelling exercises, exploring shared narrative, improvisation, and theater practitioners tools of body, voice, imagination, and spatial relationship, along with some basic text analysis tools of objective, tactic, given circumstances, and pursuing actions. Meeting in the middle, we rehearsed our plays moving in and out of practical and theoretical discussions, and supporting students in crafting a post-play discussion that could engage and include the audience in this dynamic inquiry.
For my future research, I have a greater understanding of what the term connection and interrelatedness means as I have grasped and understood it through different senses.
You don’t need an elaborate theater or years of drama school. We performed in an echoey room with uneven lighting, wearing N94 masks and basic blacks. Our props were mostly cardboard and tape, miscellaneous household items, industrial desks and chairs. Actors held scripts. There were directorial notes I swallowed, potential we could glimpse but hadn’t time to realize. Does any of that matter as much as what did happen?
I laughed, I cried. I felt the raw power of the most simple of theatrical tropes - a group of actors breaks the proscenium to put the audience in the round to hear a chorus of voices; an actor pounds on a desk startling us with unexpected violence; two actors look radiantly at a flashlight, endowing it with all the warmth of the sun. I felt my whole being respond to both the stories and the people telling them. We all stretched to meet each other at the place of risk and connection.
Enriching experience is an understatement. It was a journey on which I was able to obtain different perspectives toward climate change and artistic practice, viewing it as a scholar, a spectator and eventually as a performer myself.
Every moment of our time in Graz connected us outwards to a global conversation. Being part of the CCTA festival fosters trust in ourselves, our art form, our collaborators, and our community. And that, in turn, releases us to make powerful art. Our work in Graz was a powerful reminder to focus on the transformations that are possible - that are happening everyday - so that we lean into continuing the work, finding the light, activating joy. The future is here, now. There is no time for perfection.
The most existential threat of our time is the climate crisis. But threatening our ability to solve this crisis is increasing isolation, communication breakdowns, and reliance on virtual rather than embodied experiences. Theater - with its ability to integrate so many levels of story, experience, knowledge, science, and art - offers uniquely valuable opportunities to move individuals, groups, and humanity forward into a more thriving future.
The planetary focuses on the relationality of everything, even the nonhuman. Being aware of the fact that everything is interconnected urges humanity to think and act responsibly, as each action has a consequence. The theater experience brought this theory into life.
In conversations with students, faculty, colleagues, and community members, I came to feel keenly that our project’s power lay in counteracting toxic anxiety and grief over planetary damage through cultivating resilience and joy. The CCTA enlarges our collective capacity by fostering creative, collaborative problem-solving both head on in the face of the climate crisis, but also around it. We felt replenished after our performance, ready to take on the world’s next challenge.
In order to become proactive we should make hope our main fuel.